An unexpected recurrence across my classes this semester has been a continuous discussion about how things come to be. Whether this is material or metaphorical, it bears surprising relevance when thinking about (you guessed it) context. In one of my classes, the content of a text is distinguished between the “verbal work” and the “material work”; the verbal work being the concept and existence of a body of work inside its creator’s mind, and the material work being every step of the physical production of said text.
What is so significant about the material work is that every step along the way to produce a physical copy is influenced by the possibility of error, human or otherwise. Even in modern book production there is a margin for error, and book printing in the past was subject to even more so. The manuscript passed through so many hands just to print words on paper, not to mention the work of binding those pages together. Perhaps there is a typo somewhere – or perhaps where the text is being produced is undergoing the unfortunate influence of censorship, muddling the “intent” of the author. I use quotes around intent here to acknowledge that there is no way of knowing, when considering texts, the specific intent behind content.
Toni Morrison touches upon this in Playing in the Dark, where she delves into an in-depth and heart-wrenchingly philosophical analysis of author biases. Whether subconscious or conscious, the “verbal work” is influenced by the sociocultural environment of the time. Whether this is through racialized language or other hierarchical values, these influences present, along with the fluctuating content of the material work, a greater contextual insight into broader contexts beyond the pages of the text itself.
Consider Ulysses: the process Joyce went through to transcribe the “verbal work” into the meticulously edited and revised versions of the “material work” was Herculean (don’t let Joyce know I think that). Part of the trials Joyce went through for Ulysses was due to censorship laws; others due to his physical health (which can in part be considered a “human error” influencing the material work). Take into account more ancient works like The Odyssey or The Iliad, which were originally entirely verbal performances. Although the time and quantity of recitations could have deviated the material from its original “verbal work”, transcribing these epics into versions of their “material works” surely subjected to them to all manner of errors; additionally, every translated edition contains slight variations that can impact the way a text is consumed. The ways that things are made, and specifically the context the making of things offers when trying to understand a work to the fullest, fascinates me thoroughly.
ladybug, this is a rich discussion that takes into account a number of texts from different times. The differences between the verbal work and the material work relate very closely to debates of authorial intent and historical context, and I honestly want to see what would happen if we tried to discuss all three at once. Each are necessary to supplement the others, because all are intersectional, but it makes for a complicated and potentially heated discussion! Your mentions of The Odyssey and The Iliad in the context of verbal and material works brought to mind a specific topic for me: the transition from primarily oral to primarily written cultures. Transferring works passed down primarily by word of mouth and verbal storytelling into material texts is difficult because of the exact potential for error you described, and that potential for error is made even bigger by the fact that some stories began fundamentally different than if we were to begin to create a story today. Stories originally conceptualized and created by folks used to today’s written and read culture might be easier to transfer on-paper when they’ve always been intended as a material product, but oral traditions are different. There are few surviving, unbroken oral traditions in the wider world today, and their most effective way of transferring literature doesn’t involve a material work. However, Toni Morrison’s analysis of the verbal work still applies here: oral traditions can preserve context of past and present sociocultural factors.